MCV
The Mobile Construction Vehicle, or MCV for short, is a common unit which serves as the centre of any field base. It is able to travel on land and sea alike and can resist various degrees of attack. In addition, most MCVs are large enough to crush smaller vehicles that get in their way. Allied MCV Tactical Analysis * Mobile: Able to traverse rough terrain, the Mobile Construction Vehicle gives the Allied commander the ability to project power across the battlefield. It is also fully amphibious, able to float across open water atop a collapsible air cushion. * Productive: The MCV is able to deploy into a stationary Construction Yard. In this configuration, it can construct both production and defensive structures. The Construction Yard can also be upgraded to allow its VOIP system to produce the most advanced Allied war machines. And if the enemy gets too close, the Construction Yard can pack back up into the MCV configuration and move to a more advantageous location. * Unarmed but Dangerous: Neither the mobile or stationary configuration of the MCV is equipped with any weapons. While its sheer mass provides a level of protection against enemy weapons, the MCV requires armed support to stay alive in a high-risk environment. But minor threats beware - MCV drivers have been known to try to crush unwary enemies beneath their massive treads. * Well Stocked: MCVs are well stocked with parts before entering the battlefield. This allows commanders with the capability to construct a small base and defensive force while they are establishing their supply chain. Operational History "An excerpt from ''"Assessment of the Impact of 3rd Generation Supply Management Technology on Global Strategic Policy" by Ian Cochran Burke. This assessment was commissioned to investigate the fiscal, diplomatic, and military impact of adopting the proposed MCV Battle Command and Supply System. Burke's assessment of the impact of the MCV on warfare has proved prophetic in light of recent events."'' The tactical benefits of adopting the MCV system have been argued extensively by Mathers, O'Donnell, and others (For a complete historical analysis, see Tactical Engineering: A Review in issue 468 of Modern Warfare), and little need be added here. It is worth noting that, while many focus on the MCV's use of Standardised Production Automated Manufacturing (SPAM) Modules for building construction, in fact the technology of fabricating a wide variety of weapon systems from a single universal component is not new. Traditional production structures (War Factories, Air Fields, and the like) have been using SPAM modules for over a decade: the original SPAM modules effectively redefined mobile warfare by allowing ammunition, and later spare parts and even vehicles to be manufactured on site. A more revolutionary technological aspect of the MCV system is Virtually Operated Industrial Production (VOIP), a system that allows MCVs to remotely enable the production of advanced technology weapons. This same system can now also be found in the Allied Prospector. But the true impact of adopting the MCV system will be far more subtle. Mathers comes closest to understanding the ramifications of MCVs on the battlefield in his report to the Budget Office (See Cost Analysis: MCV). His premises are correct. The demand for forward bases in the coming conflict (have no doubt about it - war is coming) will far outweigh the number of MCVs we will be able to deploy. As MCVs relocate across the battlefield, the tendency will be to create many small, stationary bases which will remain behind when the MCV departs. But his conclusion - that these bases will have no military value and will simply be a continuing drain on our resources - is incorrect. Even if it were true, the strategic benefits would still justify moving forward with the program. The flexibility of an MCV - their extreme, amphibious mobility; their ability to carry enough to be able to deploy a small base and fighting force even when cut off from supplies; and of course their ability to quickly construct a large advanced base when well-supplied - will provide commanders with an unprecedented ability to project precise military power. But the true value of these small bases will come after the war is over. After the main enemy forces are defeated, what will be needed throughout the combat zone is the capability to quickly restore order and provide a focal point for the integration of the recently liberated into Allied culture and society. The bases that will be created across the countryside as a natural result of MCV relocation will serve this function. They, and the MCVs that create them, will be the enduring beacons of Freedom and Justice in the aftermath of the coming conflict. Quotes Just the Stats Confederate MCV "Keep on trukin!" :- Confederate MCV Tactical Analysis * Old yet functional: Confederate MCVs are stolen from old civilian stocks and refitted with new SPAM when possible to produce the structures the rebels need. Due to limited space, only defence modules are included as well as Dozer and Construction Truck components. * Blink and miss: Despite its rusting mechanisms, a Confederate MCV can deploy into a Confederate Construction Yard in mere seconds without problems. * Have you seen that?: Confederate MCVs are invisible on radar, both friendly and hostile. This allows the MCV to quietly change positions when needed without getting pestered all too quickly. Do note it has less armour than other MCVs, which is why it is radar-invisible in the first place. * Let's swim: The Confederates outfitted the MCV with floating pontoons to catch up with the other factions' MCVs. Take your fishing rods with you for the ride. Operational History WWII is often remembered as the first war in which the revolutionary Mobile Construction Vehicle partook. The "original" MCV – the Allied Mk. I "Buffalo" Mobile Construction Vehicle was created by International Inc. The Mobile Construction Vehicle was initially intended to be, of all things, a civilian construction platform. It introduced the ability to rapidly assemble modular, on-site structures using prefabricated parts, as well as a host of other novel features, the details of most of which have been kept classified to this day. The MCVs looked set to transform the construction industry. However, World War II had other plans for it. Fermenting tensions all over the globe had led the world’s powers to scramble to lay their hands on any useful technology they could find. International Inc’s hopes of cornering the construction market were dashed when military officials, having seen how fast the deployed MCV could construct a house, realised the potential of the MCV, and took steps to have it land in their hands and stay there. However, an II employee would secretly sell a copy of the blueprints to the Soviet Union (who had also realised the potential of the MCV). The employee was just in time, as mere days later, military officials confiscated all the MCVs in II’s possession and banned International Inc from selling the blueprints. Thus, when World War II broke out, both the Soviets and the Europeans entered the war with their own version of the MCV. For the entire war, both sides would use MCVs, to the point where military doctrine was transformed by it. The war ended, and the Mk I was eventually replaced in Allied service by the Mk II and later on the Mk III. This wasn’t the end of the civilian MCV, however. Banned from selling the original blueprints, International Inc sought to work around this restriction by removing all the classified systems and substituting them with (admittedly inferior) replacements. Sadly, this new version of the MCV was nowhere near to the capabilities to the original, and the idea didn’t catch on. After poor sales, most of these "watered-down" MCVs were consigned to the scrap heap, where they were forgotten for more than a decade. Until 1969. The Confederate Revolutionaries had been looking for some way to acquire a construction vehicle of their own. Having already failed on multiple occasions to steal old Allied MCVs from (heavily guarded) bases, the Confederates realised they had hit the jackpot when several of their members broke into International Inc’s unguarded scrap yards and drove away with several MCVs. Over the next few weeks, civilian model MCVs were disappearing one after another, and by the time the Allies realised the implications of this and took steps to stop the theft of MCVs, the Confederates already had a sizeable fleet of the vehicles. Upon acquiring them, the ever-resourceful Confederates made several modifications to allow their MCVs to be viable on the battlefield. Modifying the vehicles to use Construction Dozers allowed to finally compete with military grade MCVs, while mechanics found it a simple task to make the MCV invisible on radar. Soon, these old but reliable hulks were taking the fight to the enemies of liberty. Soviet MCV Tactical Analysis * I like to move-it move-it: With six independent tread nacelles, the Soviet MCV is extremely mobile, able to traverse any terrain accessible to other Soviet vehicles. It can seamlessly transition from land to water, deploying a pair of ballast pontoons while still in motion. * We can build it: Like its Allied counterpart, the Soviet version of MCV can deploy into a Construction Yard, both on land or at sea. Able to construct the full array of Soviet battlefield structures, the Construction Yard can easily convert back into its mobile form to relocate to a more advantageous location. * In the open: The Construction Yard is unable to build an entire structure and then deploy it as a whole. Instead, an external civilian construction team requires it to build structures from the foundation up at a predetermined location. This makes the structure being built vulnerable to attack during the construction process. * Large and In Charge: The MCV and Construction Yard are both unarmed and are vulnerable to attack from a variety of enemy units. Commanders are advised to provide military escorts to ensure that this important vehicle/structure is not destroyed. Of course, enemy ground units would do well to avoid being run over by this gigantic vehicle - being run over by an MCV leaves quite a mark. Operational History The world got its first view of the new Soviet Mobile Construction Vehicle in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake near the small hamlet of Smedznegorsk, Ukraine. Aid organizations and media crews broadcast images of an immense vehicle and its incongruously small crew distributing prefabricated building components to the residents of Smedznegorsk. With thousands left homeless and quickly darkening clouds on the horizon heralding the approach of a massive ice storm, initial coverage of the government aid effort began suggesting that it may have been too little, too late. Cameras continued rolling in front of speechless reporters as, moments later, a miniature city sprung to life from the wreckage. The structures themselves were grey, drab, and cookie-cutter, but they were warm and dry, a welcome replacement for the piles of rubble that were formerly homes and businesses. Soon MCVs were seen across the periphery of the Soviet Union, spurring the economy in even the poorest areas of the Union. Although obviously modelled after the Allied MCV, the Soviet Union insisted that their new vehicle was designed purely for internal reconstruction efforts, pointing to numerous investigative reports showcasing the use of the MCV in the field. Manned by civilians, Soviet MCVs appeared to be operating completely without military support and apparently lacking any sort of automated construction capability. In light of this coverage, the vehicles seemed poorly suited to military ventures. Since the Soviet military seemed to be continuing to use traditional base-building methods, many media outlets began to openly doubt that the Soviet MCV had any military utility at all. This was dramatically disproven during one of the opening conflicts of World War III. During the uprising in the ancient Central Asian city of Samarkand, Allied observation planes captured footage of a Soviet MCV, which had been rebuilding a nearby province, quickly packing up all modules and civilian workers and veering outside of the reconstruction zone. In a devastating surprise offensive, Soviet forces appeared several days later from an entrenched firebase a short ways to the north, successfully aiding the civilian uprising and pushing the Allied presence out of Samarkand. Their secret revealed, the fleet of Soviet MCVs sprung into action. Almost overnight, a constellation of military bases sprung up around the world - each centred around and created by an MCV - spawning the first wave of Soviet forces to threaten to overwhelm the Allies. The Soviet MCV has since become an iconic figure of the people's uprising. When not engaged in combat operations, the vehicles and crews continue to serve communities destroyed by the ongoing conflict, and the grey monolithic structures first seen in Smedznegorsk now shelter countless numbers of the displaced and homeless. With each village rebuilt, the Soviet army is bolstered by the impassioned and the disenfranchised, often leaving each area with another full complement of trained workers. The MCV crews remain civilian and have little difficulty shifting back and forth between their roles, working alongside military personnel to build a new base one day, and the next day rebuilding a civilian school. Like the military conflict, the battle for the loyalty and sympathies of the civilian population rages on, and the crews of the MCVs are on the front line in both fights. Just the Stats Imperial MCV "There are roads, you know!" :- Imperial MCV Tactical Analysis * Fully mobile: Like its Allied and Soviet counterparts, the Imperial MCV is extremely mobile, able to traverse difficult terrain on land as well as set out to sea in an amphibious operation. * Fully transformable: Also like its counterparts, the Imperial MCV deploys into a Construction Yard in order to build any structure needed to wage war against enemies of the Empire. Fully functional on land or sea, the Construction Yard can reconfigure into its mobile form just as easily. * Fully fecund: Unlike its counterparts, the Imperial Construction Yard does not build structures directly. Instead, it carries a large deployment of mobile Nanocores. These Nanocores can deploy anywhere on the battlefield, regardless of the distance from the MCV that created them. * Fully flexible: Commanders must carefully weigh the risks of leaving their MCV in one location and relying on the mobility of the Nanocores to expand their base. The extreme vulnerability of the Nanocores in transit - they are unarmed, like the MCV, and lack the extreme mass and armour to survive serious attacks - means that the wise commander will consider relocating his MCV closer to the Nanocores' ultimate destination. WWIII Operational History Not all of the casualties of the recent war have seen combat. Consider the case of Bart Truxton, imprisoned for carrying out espionage for the Empire of the Rising Sun. Though Truxton was recently exonerated, the full details of his story are so fantastic, so utterly unbelievable, they seem literally ripped from the pages of a modern science fiction novel. More and more evidence continues to surface that confirms the story and demonstrates the immense complexity and effectiveness of Imperial espionage activities during the war. When the first MCV flying the sunburst flag of the Empire of the Rising Sun rolled ashore at the Battle of Green Island, Allied security recognized that a catastrophic breach had occurred. There simply had not been enough time, argued top military intelligence officials, for the Japanese to have developed their own MCV since the Allies had publically revealed their own vehicle - they must have had someone on the inside. Through a painstaking investigation, security personnel tracked down video tapes of Truxton apparently stealing detailed technical documentation about the Allied MCV from a German lab and transmitting it to a ship waiting offshore (later determined to be a Yari mini-sub). A military tribunal convicted Truxton to life in a high-security prison. It was not until Allied scientists unlocked another mystery of the war - a high-level Imperial encoding process nicknamed "Wistful Blossom" - that the depth of the subterfuge began to become clear. A vast amount of encrypted Imperial information had been intercepted by the Allies in the course of the war, but much of it lay undeciphered in vast databanks. Once "Wistful Blossom" was cracked, a specific division of Allied intelligence was formed with the singular goal of piecing together the fragments of Imperial communications. A year and a half into that process, they decrypted a set of transmissions that told a shocking story. The Empire of the Rising Sun had deployed an astoundingly lifelike robot, modelled as an exact duplicate of Truxton, to steal information about Allied vehicles. They had also deployed three other robots to observe the real Truxton extensively, gathering all of the personal, professional, and private data required to fashion a realistic facsimile. These robots then recruited Truxton for a weekly poker game, during which time the doppelganger Truxton obtained the real Truxton's security card and carried out the espionage. All of the robots were then ordered by Imperial high command to initiate self-destruction sequences --- remains of one were found in a warehouse fire, although its exact nature wasn't understood at the time - destroying both evidence of the deception and Truxton's alibi simultaneously. Upon first being presented with the news of Truxton's unwitting participation in the traitorous activities, the Allied military chafed. It was nigh unthinkable that a plan this elaborate could have occurred under the watchful eye of the Allied military. However, further corroboration came when another set of transmissions was deciphered detailing a similar operation in the Soviet Union. (Unfortunately, Maxim Novikov died in a Siberian gulag before his name was cleared.) While the stolen technology undoubtedly aided the research efforts of the Imperial MCV program, their vehicle is anything but an exact copy of the Allied and Russian versions. Instead, the Japanese engineers used the acquired designs as a springboard for their own ideas, coming up with a system that is well-specialised for their own military doctrines, and applying the same creativity and attention to detail that Imperial spies used to gather the information in the first place. Post-War Operational History Apart from the new structures and defences which can be built, the MCV has received new software for producing Nanocores. Imperial Commanders are now able to produce Nanocores like in other production buildings - en masse - by queuing multiple cores at once. Chinese Orbital Command Vehicle "Make it so." :- Chinese OCV commander Tactical Analysis * Where no man has gone before: The Atomic Kingdom's Orbital Command Vehicle disregards the short-comings of similar craft because it, well, flies. Able to go anywhere without care about the terrain, the only thing the OCV has to consider is enemy anti-air fire. * Full Impulse: The OCV is surprisingly quick for an aircraft of its size. However, it cannot keep up with smaller and more agile aircraft such as fighters. * Like Terrans, like Aliens: Every OCV is ordered to scout the regions it flies into beforehand, and if it finds suitable land or even water areas, it can settle down to begin the lengthy process of constructing a base. *'Battlefield Command': Once deployed, the OCV can construct only one building: the Planetary Assembly, but can also link its systems with a Space Elevator, allowing it to bring men and vehicles down to the battlefield. Operational History Most countries have systems in place to help them supply their armies. Russia has her trains, allowing men and materiel to get to the front quickly. The Allied shipping fleet, aided by air transportation and the Master Chronospheres, were able to breach the vast gulf of the Pacific to supply the Allied armies in Europe with the logistics they needed. Japan built its Floating Fortresses in secret, each capable of supporting entire invasion armies. Not so for the Atomic Kingdom. Thirty years' of constant war left China's transportation system in poor shape, and the atomic holocaust left it in complete shambles. Roads and rails are wrecked, radioactive fallout makes travelling without proper protection dangerous, and air transport and teleportation are of limited help at best. Moreover, bandits and warlords would attack any supply lines that weren't guarded well enough, at best delaying and at worse stealing valuable supplies. Even with cloning and rapid duplication capability, the Atomic Kingdom simply couldn't spare the resources to guard every last supply line. For a time it looked like it might be impossible to mount a campaign of any sort outside of China. The Atomic Kingdom's logistics masterstroke, then, was to cut out the vulnerable, land based supply lines entirely, and replace them with far less vulnerable space-based supply lines. Of course, to do this would require means of getting the supplies from orbit to the surface; for this, space elevators were to be used, the technology already within Atomic Chinese grasp. However, a space elevator would be a vulnerable target, and as such would need to be defended, which would require a field base. With the need for a field base, it was only logical that some sort of MCV-equivalent would be needed. As the Atomic Kingdom lacked a vehicle suitable for the task, one would have to be designed. The Atomic Kingdom's "Zhuge"-class Sky Forge, also known as the Orbital Construction Vehicle, is that vehicle. It is the result of several weeks of hard work on the part of a team of Chinese engineers from the Royal Aircraft Factory in Tibet. When it was finally complete, several high ranking officials were there in person to see its unveiling. The doors of the hangar that contained the first of many "Zhuge"-class Sky Forges opened on the roof. An imposing black shape rose from the hangar, defying gravity with its massive thrusters that propelled it off the ground. In the forthcoming demonstration, the "Zhuge" performed exactly to expectations, and proved itself to be just as worthy of orbital flight as it was of atmospheric flight. At the "Zhuge's" heart was a fission power core, powerful enough to power all of the "Zhuge's" onboard systems and still have some leftover energy to spare. It contained enough room for several dozen crew, who would pilot the new vessel. The "Zhuge" was equipped with the state of the art in Chinese technology; the latest communication relays, databanks that could store vast information, powerful beacons that would allow the Chinese to pinpoint the "Zhuge" wherever it was, and much, much more. The one flaw of the Zhuge, if it had one, was its utter lack of weaponry, in part due to the fact that the vast array of equipment crammed into the "Zhuge's" hull left no room for weaponry. Never the less, this shortcoming was not important, and the Atomic Chinese, satisfied with the "Zhuge", ordered that it be put into full production. Now the surest sign of Atomic Kingdom presence, the ships of "Zhuge"-class have begun to see deployment in the field, with considerable success thus far. Each Zhuge-class is designed to act as a command and control centre once deployed into a Command Yard, and is also equipped with an internal duplicator for the construction of other structures, though it is only capable of constructing two buildings; the Space Elevator hub, which is used to bring in supplies and units from orbit, and the Planetary Assembly, which acts as the drop off point for local ore collection operations and also responsible for establishing the rest of a field base. Category:Units